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Wednesday, 7 September 2011

Route Master: the 2010 London Festival of Architecture

With the 2012 Olympics coming round that last bend and into view, this year's geographic-route-fixated London Festival of Architecture decided on 'The Welcoming City' as its theme. But just how welcome was that as an idea...

The official address for the building known colloquially
as the 'Gherkin' is 30 St Mary Axe. On the same street is a church
called St Andrew Undershaft, which goes generally unused by the bankers
who work nearby. Once a year, though, the church comes alive with a
memorial service for a man called John Stow, who compiled a survey of
London in 1598, which was, in effect, an ageing historian divining the
medieval street plan of the city that had been built upon during its
rapid expansion during the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth. Today,
Stow is, in turn, remembered. During the annual service, a quill is
placed in the hand of his statue, where it stays for a year. The old
quill is given to a child who has written the finest essay on London. In
the very shadow of modern London, as part of a quaint, old ceremony,
the city’s children are encouraged to divine their own path through the
metropolis.

At the Duke of York Steps, just off The Mall, Matthew
Lloyd Architects presented their intervention for the London Festival of
Architecture: a water-powered lift

Since it was established by Peter Murray in 2004, the
London Festival of Architecture has presented new architecture through a
historical frame, revealing old routes through medieval London, through
carnival and play. Peter Murray has cited Peter Ackroyd’s book 'London:
The Biography' as inspiration for the event, which advocates at every
turn the spirit of place, drawing out it through the peeling away of
layers of historical fact, literary allusion and intuition. Murray has
also said of the author, however, that 'although he has a natural
fascination with the old, Ackroyd accepts the idea of change and renewal
as a part of the life force of the place.’ In keeping with this, Murray
organised a herd of cows to be driven down St John Street, highlighting
the fact that this street, with its fashionable restaurants and trendy
architects' practices, was once an important livestock route to
Smithfield Market.

London Festival of Architecture windows as mere window dressing in London's Regent Street

This tactic was informative, but it was also critical. One
got the impression at this year’s London Festival of Architecture,
however, that, in these straitened times, London’s civic authorities are
using this carnivalesque strategy to replace real development. The
'Nash Ramblas' is a grand scheme by Sir Terry Farrell, architect of,
among other projects, the MI6 Building in London, Seoul's Incheon
International Airport, and the Beijing South Railway Station. The idea
is to build on the success of the Jubilee Walkway on the South Bank and
create a grand walk that links Primrose Hill to St James’s Park. It
turns the spine of the scheme proposed by the architect Nash to the
Prince Regent in 1811 – an avenue from the Regent’s home at Carlton
House in the Mall to Regent Street – into a pedestrian boulevard.

'The London Gate' proposal by DONIS of the Netherlands for a new landmark at London's Aldgate

The project was proposed several years ago, but is still
on the drawing board of London’s planning authorities, which are placed
in the hands of the individual London boroughs. The new office of London
Mayor has some powers for strategy, but as it has proved reluctant to
use them or extend them. The problem is that there is no real public
hunger for the project. Attempts to rekindle it during the London
Festival of Architecture were at best misguided. The sight of Paul
Finch, Director of CABE and the World Architecture Festival, dressed up
as The Duke of York and Will Alsop as Nash was too much for most London
architects to bare. Focusing on this route didn’t feel so much like the
rediscovering of an ancient way through the city, but rather the touting
of Farrell’s pet architectural project.

At the festival, the Nash Ramblas (Farrell’s main
masterplanning idea for any city is to introduce a copy of the Barcelona
street) was also celebrated by the minor intervention of a cunning,
water-powered lift, designed by Matthew Lloyd Architects and located on
the Duke of York Steps at the eastern end of the Mall. The project as a
whole, though, still feels strangely irrelevant. The opening of the
Jubilee route along the river was combined with the opening of Tate
Modern and the Millennium Bridge, as well as the reinvigoration of the
South Bank Centre and the building of City Hall. The walkway connects
London’s new and refurbished cultural sites. Farrell’s scheme seems,
basically, to mean the pedestrianisation of a couple of streets, and the
only cultural signficance of Primrose Hill, where Farrell’s route
rises, is that Jude Law lives there. The Regent Street Windows project
for the LFA, in which some of London’s best architecture practices
worked with major retailers, was, quite literally, window dressing.

It seems as if routes are becoming the new means of
getting architecture and regeneration on the cheap, and, in difficult
times, the LFA is playing along. We learned of a new one at this year’s
festival: High Street 2012. Londoners had hitherto known the road that
leaves Aldgate in the east of the City of London and finishes in
Stratford as either the A11 or as the Mile End Road or Bow Road,
depending on which bit you're talking about. Since the arrival of the
Olympics, however, this jumbled stretch of low-end retail, a university,
hospitals and housing is being rebranded. Typical of the approach taken
to it by the Olympic Delivery Authority is Studio Egret West's 'Shoal',
a piece of public sculpture placed in front of an old shoppping centre,
which simply hides an unpleasant piece of architecture behind a large
screen.

'Aldgate to the World' proposal by Juan Alfonso Galan Arquitecto

Indeed, it was significant that the events for the High
Street 2012 part of the LFA were focused in Aldgate or in Stratford,
that is, at either end of the road. In Aldgate, an exhibition of
competition ideas for a gateway to the City demonstrated the huge
reduction in scale of architectural ambition that this recession version
of the London Festival of Architecture marks. Several of the
shortlisted projects show the Gherkin in the background, looming over
the design. Anyone who has approached London on the A11 – sorry, on High
Street 2012 – will know that the Gherkin already acts as the gateway to
the City.

One shouldn’t be completely critical, though. The cultural
component of the Olympic Games has led to a re-routing of arts funding
in the UK for a year, so arts bodies and major cultural enterprises
across the country are thinking about how they can put on what will be
known as 'welcoming events'. Given that the theme of the LFA this year
was 'The Welcoming City', the festival organisers were clearly thinking
along the same lines. The problem is that the LFA events in Stratford
proved how polarised attitudes to the Olympics are. Austrian practice
Feld72’s 'Hyperlympics' installation in Stratford showed no real
engagement with the idea of welcoming, blasting noise at anyone who
attempted to engage with it and rejecting the idea of the Olympics as
spectacle. Elsewhere, a tour by Laura Oldfield Ford (she of 'Savage
Messiah' zine) presented a critical, polemical view of the process by
which the Olympics project has been developed, but it was certainly no
welcome.

Conversely, Carmody Groarke’s Studio East Dining by
Bistrotheque is most welcoming, if not the most accessible. Situated on
top of the Westfield Shopping Centre that is being built adjacent to the
Olympics site, the temporary restaurant is constructed ingeniously from
materials scavenged from the building site. It creates a theatrical
panopticon for the Olympics development and is also a well PR-ed society
event. With dinners at £70 a pop, it was beyond the reach of most
pockets, although that may, inadvertently, be a commentary on the Games
themselves.

Perhaps the slightly flat sensation one was left with
after this year's LFA is as much a product of an historical moment as a
result of the programme itself. The impressive patchwork of sponsorship
the organisers always stitch together was, naturally, greatly
compromised this year, due to the economic climate. More significantly,
though, there may have been a strategic re-think and prioritising in
time for 2012, with a conscious move from critical events to celebratory
ones.